Digital Preservation and Access to Cultural and Scientific Heritage: Presentation of the KT-DigiCult-BG Project

The fast development and wide application of digital methods, combined with broadened access to the Internet and falling computing costs, have created intense interest in electronic presentation and access to cultural and scientific heritage resources. Information technologies have offered cultural institutions new opportunities for the presentation of their holdings, which are now made accessible not only to the specialists, but also to the citizens and interested parties worldwide. The paper presents an overview of the Bulgarian experience in the field of digital preservation and access and on-going work on the project “Knowledge Transfer for the Digitisation of Scientific and Cultural Heritage to Bulgaria” (MTKD-CT-2004-509754) supported by the Marie Curie programme of the FP6 of the EC.

MINERVA – the Ministerial Network for Valorising Activities in Digitisation Towards an Agreed European Platform for Digitisation of Cultural and Scientific Heritage

MINERVA is a project funded by the European Commission IST Programme within the 5th Framework Programme. It created a network of EU Ministries and other agencies in charge of cultural policies and programmes, which is open to enlargement to new countries and new sectors of the civil society. The network discusses, correlates and harmonises the activities carried out in the field of digitisation of cultural and scientific heritage, aiming at creating a common European platform made up of agreed recommendations, guidelines, standards. The network acts also to foster collaboration between European Commission and Member States, to ensure awareness of European policies at national level, to exchange good practice, to coordinate national programmes in order to embed in national digitisation activities the technical results achieved by the network. Some main outcomes of the activities are presented.

Mobile Access to Cultural and Historical Heritage Web Pages

The main focus of attention in this paper is the access to websites of leading regional, national and world museums. Their accessibility from desktop and mobile devices is hereby evaluated. The paper covers a detailed analysis of the mobile operating systems, their market share in Bulgaria and the opportunities they offer to the users. The need for contemporary cultural and historical heritage websites which maintain lighter but fully-functioning mobile versions, facilitating and making their access from portable devices easier, is also well-grounded here.

Digitization of Cultural and Historical Heritage of Armenians in Bulgaria - Priorities and Perspectives

The paper deals with digitization as a method of protecting and preserving cultural and historical heritage of Armenians in Bulgaria. It attempts to establish the level of development of this process in the country, to identify the good examples and information gaps in order to outline the priorities and perspectives.

Partner Projects of “Ivan Vazov” Public Library – Plovdiv on Digitization of Cultural and Historical Heritage

Digitization offers excellent opportunities for the preservation and safe-keeping of valuable library collections. The article recounts the first coordinated attempts of “Ivan Vazov” Public Library – Plovdiv at digitizing some of its treasured collections such as manuscripts, early printed books and archives through partner projects and revealing them to the world community.

The Future of the Next-Generation Internet and Possible Applications into Education and Culture Heritage

There are several initiatives such as: US Ignite, Software Defined Networking (SDN), OpenFlow, Global Environment for Network Innovation (GENI), WiMAX and Internet 2 dealing with the future of the internet. The goal of the paper is to understand the goals, intricacies, and nuances of some of these techniques and show some of the possibilities of next-generation high-speed networking and their applications into education and culture heritage.

Mobile Applications for Cultural and Historical Places

A review of free applications of smartphones working under the operation system of Android is made in the paper. The applications present users information about historical and cultural places of interest at travelling. There are three main groups of applications subject of discussion in the paper – world, national and regional. Their abilities, positive and negative characteristics are compares and described. A conclusion can be made that there is a necessity of new application that presents tourists detailed information about the Old capital of Bulgaria.

Digitisation of Cultural Heritage: between EU Priorities and Bulgarian Realities

* The part of this article presenting institutional involvement is an extended and updated version of the respective part of a report on Bulgaria prepared by Milena Dobreva for a MINERVAPlus Global Report (Coordinating digitisation in Europe. Progress report of the National Representatives Group: coordination mechanisms for digitisation policies and programmes 2004, forthcoming).

Social - Oriented Applications of the Folklore Heritage for the Needs of the Non-formal Learning and Cultural Tourisms

The report presents a description of the most popular digital folklore archives in the world. Specifications for designing and developing web-based social-oriented applications in the field of education and cultural tourism are formulated on the basis of comparative analysis. A project for structuring and categorizing the content is presented. A website for accessing the digital folklore archive is designed and implemented.

Digital Libraries and Portals Saving National Cultural Heritage (IMI–BAS Experience)

The current research activities of the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (IMI—BAS) include the study and application of knowledge-based methods for the creation, integration and development of multimedia digital libraries with applications in cultural heritage. This report presents IMI-BAS’s developments at the digital library management systems and portals, i.e. the Bulgarian Iconographical Digital Library, the Bulgarian Folklore Digital Library and the Bulgarian Folklore Artery, etc. developed during the several national and international projects: - "Digital Libraries with Multimedia Content and its Application in Bulgarian Cultural Heritage" (contract 8/21.07.2005 between the IMI–BAS, and the State Agency for Information Technologies and Communications; - FP6/IST/P-027451 PROJECT LOGOS "Knowledge-on-Demand for Ubiquitous Learning", EU FP6, IST, Priority 2.4.13 "Strengthening the Integration of the ICT research effort in an Enlarged Europe" - NSF project D-002-189 SINUS "Semantic Technologies for Web Services and Technology Enhanced Learning". - NSF project IO-03-03/2006 ―Development of Digital Libraries and Information Portal with Virtual Exposition "Bulgarian Folklore Heritage". The presented prototypes aims to provide flexible and effective access to the multimedia presentation of the cultural heritage artefacts and collections, maintaining different forms and format of the digitized information content and rich functionality for interaction. The developments are a result of long- standing interests and work in the technological developments in information systems, knowledge processing and content management systems. The current research activities aims at creating innovative solutions for assembling multimedia digital libraries for collaborative use in specific cultural heritage context, maintaining their semantic interoperability and creating new services for dynamic aggregation of their resources, access improvement, personification, intelligent curation of content, and content protection. The investigations are directed towards the development of distributed tools for aggregating heterogeneous content and ensuring semantic compatibility with the European digital library EUROPEANA, thus providing possibilities for pan- European access to rich digitalised collections of Bulgarian cultural heritage.

Personal Work Space and Content Analysis Functionality in a Cultural Heritage Digital Library

The paper presents a different vision for personalization of the user’s stay in a cultural heritage digital library that models services for personalized content marking, commenting and analyzing that doesn’t require strict user profile, but aims at adjusting the user’s individual needs. The solution is borrowed from real work and studying of traditional written content sources (incl. books, manuals), where the user mainly performs activities such as underlining the important parts of the content, writing notes and inferences, selecting and marking zones of their interest in pictures, etc. In the paper a special attention is paid to the ability to execute learning analysis allowing different ways for the user to experience the digital library content with more creative settings.

Discover the Thracians - An Approach for Use of 2D and 3D Technologies for Digitization of Cultural Heritage in the Field of E-learning

Information and communication technologies (ICT) offer an easier access to and a multi-perspective view of cultural heritage artifacts and may also enrich and improve cultural heritage education through the adoption of innovative learning/teaching methods. This paper examines the different practices and opportunities for digitization of cultural artifacts with historical significance and describes the work on a pilot project concerning the development of e-learning materials in the Thracian cultural and historical heritage. The proposed method presents an approach based on a combination of 2D and 3D technologies to facilitate the overall process of digitization of individual objects. This approach not only provides greater opportunities for presenting the Thracian heritage but also new perspectives for studying it - students, scientists, PhD students will have the opportunity to work with the materials without having access to them.

3D Laser Scanning for Digital Preservation and Dissemination of Cultural Heritage Main scanned objects - Four Temples of Different Religions in Sofia

The project demonstrates the use of modern technologies for preservation and presentation of the cultural and historical heritage. The idea is a database of cultural and historical heritage sites to be created applying three dimensional laser scanning technology and a combination of geodetic and photogrammetric methods and shooting techniques. For the purposes of carrying out this project, we have focused on some heritage sites in the central part of Sofia. We decided to include these particular buildings because of the fact that there is hardly another city in the world where within a radius of 400 m are located four temples of different religions - Jewish, Muslim, Orthodox and Catholic. In the recent years, preservation of cultural heritage has been increasingly linked to objectives of sustainable development. Today, it has become clear that cultural heritage is also an economic resource that should be used for further economic development (through compulsory preservation of its authentic cultural values). There has been a more active public debate on the role of cultural heritage, regarding the following topics: improving the quality of life through development of cultural tourism, leading to an increase of the employment rate, constantly improving the business climate, etc. Cultural heritage preservation is becoming one of the priority objectives of the urban development policy. The focus has been shifted to new ways of preservation, mainly combinations of sophisticated technological solutions and their application for the purposes of preservation and dissemination of the cultural heritage.

Linguistic Corpora as International Cultural Heritage: The Corpus of Bulgarian and Ukrainian Parallel Texts

The paper relates about our ongoing work on the creation of a corpus of Bulgarian and Ukrainian parallel texts. We discuss some differences in the approaches and the interpretation of some concepts, as well as various problems associated with the construction of our corpus, in particular the occasional ‘nonparallelism’ of original and translated texts. We give examples of the application of the parallel corpus for the study of lexical semantics and note the outstanding role of the corpus in the lexicographic description of Ukrainian and Bulgarian translation equivalents. We draw attention to the importance of creating parallel corpora as objects of national as well as global cultural heritage.

Recovering Valuable Artifacts of the Cultural Heritage through Modern Technology and Equipment

This paper presents the digital reconstruction of the carving of the iconostasis of the Assumption church in the town of Bansko in its original form, a research project of the Department of Mathematical Linguistics of the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.